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ECO-OP

Intellectual Merit: The
purpose of this INTEROP proposal is to facilitate the deployment
of an Integrated Ecosystem Approach (IEA) to management in the
Northeast and California Current Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs).
The direct result of the proposed activity will be
application-level data and information enhanced communication
for developing the consensus networks to define the specific
components of interest to support the implementation of NOAA’s
Driver-Pressure-State-Impact Response framework (DPSIR) decision
framework and the cyberinfrastructure technologies to ensure
data interoperability and reuse. This new capability will serve
as the essential foundation for the formal synthesis and
quantitative analysis of information on relevant natural and
socio–economic factors in relation to specified ecosystem
management goals which can be applied in other LMEs. The scope
of the network includes key stakeholders in four areas:
scientists and data providers, agencies, national communities of
practice, and decision makers/ policy developers. The network
will undertake major activities at the core team working level;
technical sessions and focused workshops within each of the
stakeholder areas as well as across and among the areas.
Integrative activities, aligned with existing community
conferences and meeting will provide dissemination and broad
engagement opportunities. Also key to the network activities is
semantically rich use case development using expertise in
semantic web methodologies, especially related to diverse
vocabulary needs across the stakeholder areas. These
methodologies have been implemented and evaluated in several
natural science settings over the past 5- years. Technical
expertise in the project team, both funded and via
collaboration, covers data repositories, science and management
of the environmental systems, assessment, and semantically
enabled cyberinfrastructure and data frameworks spanning a large
range of (non-specialist) end-use.

Broader Impacts: Explicit
in this project is the very broad dissemination of results; the
diverse major stakeholders include decision and policy makers
both at the agency and government levels as well as agency
scientists and managers. The developed semantics based on
leveraging existing standard vocabularies is likely to have very
broad interest and use and enable extended interoperability
across many disciplines. The very nature of open
(semantically-enabled) data frameworks is that they receive
substantial unintended use with the potential to provide
substantial infrastructure improvements for research and
education. The potential benefits to society at large in terms
of providing a routine and sustainable IEA that is linked to
decisions and policy along with the feedbacks to the underlying
monitoring and data collection cannot be under estimated. This
project is very high on the national agenda: On June 12, 2009
President Obama established a high-level Ocean Policy Task Force
to craft the first US national policy for the overall goals of
sustainably managing the country's oceans1. The task force, to
be led by the Chair of the Presidents Council on Environmental
Quality (CEQ), is charged with developing policy framework for a
comprehensive, integrated, ecosystem based approach to ocean
resource management that addresses conservation, economic
activity, user conflict, and sustainable use of ocean, coastal,
and Great Lakes. The task force has been given 180 days to
complete this task. In his presidential directive on this
matter, President Obama specifically recognizes that this new
national ocean policy will require new consensus driven, science
based decision support networks and tools. This project would
provide a robust and sustainable implementation for this
directive.